For Colored Kids Who Committed Suicide, Our Outrage Isn’t Enough

Queer Youth of Color, Bullying, and the Discursive Limits of Identity and Safety

Eric Darnell Pritchard

In recent years anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) bullying has been a pervasive discussion in popular and scholarly discourse. While such a discussion has documented the negative impact of bullying on the physical, psychological, social, and emotional lives of young people, it has not had a critical and sustained analysis of the ways that race, ethnicity, class, and other identities complicate discussions of how bullying and bias-motivated violence affects a diversity of queer youth. In this article, Eric Darnell Pritchard begins with a framework that assumes that the intersections of LGBTQ identities with race, ethnicity, and class offer unexplored critical possibilities within current discussions of bullying. He argues that in order to be more creative and effective in responding to the epidemic of bullying, we must expose and deeply engage the limits in the ways identity and safety are taken up in bullying discourse, which have resulted in flattened and less effective antibullying measures. Pritchard concludes with implications for practice in terms of curriculum, policy, and advocacy.

Eric Darnell Pritchard is an assistant professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His writings have appeared in Palimpsest, Southern Communication Journal, Home Girls Makes Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, African American Review, and Diverse, among other scholarly volumes. He is presently working on a book-length manuscript titled Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy.